Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Photo cookies

Today I am working on photo cookies. It's interesting that they seem to come in waves. Then I have to gently gnudge the printer and tell it to stop sleeping, it's time for work!

Many people ask about how the photo processing is done. They can't quite imagine it, but it's really quite simple. It's a regular Canon 5-cartridge inkjet printer, but the cartridges have food coloring in them instead of regular ink. Then sheets of this paper-thin edible stuff (it smells sort of like marshmallows when the package is opened), are run through the printer. Some of the sheets come with templates of circles or hearts already, and there's a program that works with those templates. The icing sheets most often used are the 1/4 sheets, however. I'm skilled in Adobe Illustrator, and I use that to layout the images as needed. If you still want to believe the process is magic, however, I won't argue with you!

Many people also don't understand that even printed text is considered a photo cookie because it's done with the printer.

The time of year, of course, people are very interested in photo hearts. We don't just put the photo on the cookie, however. Each cookie always has some sort of hand-decorated design to it, even if it's just a decorative border. We also use pearl dragees and colored sugars, nonpareils, and jimmies.

No matter the cookie, Signature Sweet Shoppe makes them delicious!

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